the garden thread

Beautiful! Can't believe how much further ahead you are.
When should we expect the saffron bulbs to start coming up ? I planted some late last fall after seeing yours. I placed an order for 25 bulbs. I got a pack of 10. Then another 10. Then nothing for a long while . Disappointed. Then I got a letter dated 11/23 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Mail Interception Notice. They quarenteened my saffron because it was missing a Phylo-sanitary certificate. Some time later, I started receiving more saffron bulbs. Lots of bulbs. 100's . Not quite sure why I got so many, but every friend I have now has saffron bulbs planted. Hope some of them come up. They were planted after the last frost.

 

Wife just came home with a bundle of new starts, soon as I'm not sick anymore I'll be setting up our garden again

 

all was going great onions and garlic in as i did potatoes. low and behold mother nature is tring to pull a fast one on me and tosed a frost warning on me. all roses are covered as are the blue and raz berrys. we will see how well that helps over night

needed to add that i hve no clue why the blue berrys are bloomign so early (all but one plant ) and they were sposta be over all the summer

 

Yeah, the weather around here definitely turned the last few days. Hope your stuff makes it through tonight.

 

looks lie the peas we started will go in tomorrow or sunday then we can start lookig in to planting or seed starting the resto of the garden. as for the early blooms and buds i dont care when the food comes in just so long as it does. the bad thing is i have not seen much in the way of bees yet this year

 

Don't expect anything until fall. The bulbs go dormant over the summer, then start popping up in autumn.

We're having a really early spring due to the warm winter we had. I've even got roses blooming now--usually don't really start having blooms until June. We had a cold front come through the other day, so I have to schlep the tomatoes into the garage at night. We even had a couple days of frost recently--we had almost none this winter.

We've had a lot of bees. With all the spring flowers blooming, they've been going nuts. Seeing a lot more honey bees than usual. A good thing since a truck carrying bees dumped a few million of them on the highway the other day. Seeing a lot of hornets and spiders extra early this year, too.

 

Yesterday my wife had me create a couple flower beds out front for her. They went so well, that she decided we needed to expand out current garden. We have a 2x8 foot raised bed garden, with tomatoes and grapes along our fence.

She hates the side of our house, and I do too because it's difficult to mow. So, we decided to do 8 more raised bed gardens and we will create a little walking path (no more mowing!).

The above pic is my truck weighed down with soil, compost, and wood from Lowes.

This picture is the result of about 3 hours of work. We added strawberries, kale, romaine lettuce, and spinach so far. I still have 4 boxes unplanted, because they are in a partially shaded area, and we need to figure out what else grows in partial shade. I'll post another pic when the walkway is done hopefully!

 

Talk about "farm to table"!!! Frickin' AWESOME!

 

Yeah that's some serious garden work

 

All the stuff that is just starting for yall is dying out here. We're halfway through peas already.

Lucretia, those dogwoods are beautiful. One of the things I miss most about the real south, it's too hot here for them.

 

Thanks Andre! I love the dogwoods. We've probably added a dozen or more to the yard.

A couple different dogwoods for you:

Bunchberries--about 3" tall, they're in the dogwood family and make a good groundcover:




And a variegated dogwood. If you look towards the center of the photo, you can find a bloom. It's stripey, too. The leaves stay green and white until the fall--love them at dusk. They seem to glow.

 

Be sure to mark your calendars!

 

May is quite an odd month.

 

peas are in and the green beans are in the starter set. direct sow the rest maybe next week no rush this year. the realy odd thing is that all the blueberrys are blooming (they should be staggered but this year not so much
peppersand tomatos have not been shipped to me yet

 

5 puny little tomatoes in pots:



Meanwhile, some of my favorite little conifers are putting on a show. This one has brilliant yellow new needles (they'll turn green later)



And this one is only knee high and covered with purple cones:

lox cold smoked salmon

And the irises are going to town. This one looks tie dyed and smells like grape koolaid/pixy stix:

 

So far I have 3 potato patches planted, 1 bed of sugar snap peas with red leaf lettuce. A bunch of onions and garlic, green beans, carrots, radishes and a couple dozen tomato plants. Raspberries, blueberries, 3 new apple trees and 5 peach trees. Finally figured how to keep the deer out of the garden. Liquid fence (made from rotten eggs) is working great to keep the deer out. I also bought a motion sensor sprinkler that Lucretia told me about. That works really good on me.

I am also growing weeds in the pasture. Not sure what they are, but they grow about knee high and have lots of bright yellow flowers that look like a cross between a gerbera daisy and sunflower.

 

This is a photo of the weeds in the fields. The flowers are 2 or 3 inches across.
I don't have a clue what they are, but Lucretia should know. She knows everything.

 

if nothing else they will bring i the bees

will be doing the next batch of planting this weekend. only thing not started yet is the zuke. rotten beagle tried to dig up one of the potatoes hope if makes it and hope she didtn eat any of the leaves.

 

Let's try again...

 

Looks like it might be Balsamroot. Either Puget Balsamroot (http://biology.burke.washington.edu/herbarium/imagecollection.php?Genus=Balsamorhiza&Species=deltoidea )

or maybe Arrowleaf Balsamroot (http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/balsamorhiza_sagittata.shtml)

I have a couple good weed books. One of them has plants grouped by the color of their flowers. Makes it much easier to find things.